3 Vermont brewers taking beer world by storm

Three Vermont brewers are taking the beer world by storm, and on their own terms

Mar. 1, 2013

Phil Young pours a beer called Mary at the Hill Farmstead Brewery retail store in Greensboro on Wednesday. Hill Farmstead was recently named the best brewery in the world by the RateBeer website. / GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS

Written by

Dan D’Ambrosio

Free Press Staff Writer

John Kimmich of The Alchemist in Waterbury — where he brews his wildly popular Heady Topper beer — isn’t kidding when he says this in a recent interview. In fact, Kimmich doesn’t kid about much when it comes to Heady Topper.

“We make good beer,” Kimmich says. “People say you need great marketing, this, that, and the other, but we don’t do marketing. We’ve never advertised. Our theory from day one was, ‘Let’s just make the best possible beer we can, and people will be attracted to it.’”

Kimmich’s confidence is shared by two other Vermont brewers — Shaun Hill of Hill Farmstead Brewery in Greensboro, and Sean Lawson of Lawson’s Finest Liquids in Warren — which among them have racked up all kinds of high-profile honors in the beer world. Hill Farmstead was recently named the best brewery in the world by RateBeer, a beer rating website with hundreds of thousands of members and reviewers from around the world.

The trio of breweries have helped to drive a burgeoning beer tourism circuit in Vermont that draws people not only from throughout New England, but also from as far away as Chicago and Florida.

“Beer tourism is alive and well,” Lawson said. “People will plan a trip to Vermont for a long weekend, or a vacation motivated primarily by the beer. They can make the rounds at various breweries and events.”

On a recent weekday visit to The Alchemist, on high ground in Waterbury, beer lovers from throughout New England — license plates showed Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as Vermont — exited the building cradling cardboard flats of Heady Topper four-packs, looking like they had just robbed a bank.

Inside the small lobby out front of the brewery, the scene was just this side of bedlam, as more beer lovers lined up for their allotments of Heady Topper, packing the place to the gills by mid-morning. Sitting on a couch in an upstairs office —above the fray — Kimmich, 41, reflected on the demand.

“This past week was our first week of having twice as much beer available, and we still sold out,” he said.

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The final expansion

Kimmich opened the brewery on Aug. 29, 2011, with a capacity of 1,500 barrels annually, the day after the pub he owned with his wife in Waterbury — The Alchemist — was wiped out by Tropical Storm Irene. Three months later, Kimmich doubled that capacity to 3,000 barrels. Now, he makes 6,000 barrels annually, and has plans to grow to 9,000 barrels, where he says he will stop — for good.

“That’s it, all the Heady Topper that will ever be made on Earth,” he says. “We’re not going to grow again. We’re not going to a new building to create a huge brewery. This is it.”

The expansion at The Alchemist will be contained within the walls of the existing building, just using space more wisely, Kimmich says. He hasn’t put a completion date on it, because then Heady Topper’s fans will only be disappointed if it doesn’t happen on schedule.

“We’re not GE, give you a date,” Kimmich says. “It’s a collective of people working their butts off to make it happen as quickly as we can.”

Kimmich and his wife, Jen, have 23 employees at The Alchemist. The couple has a son in the third grade named Charlie, whom Kimmich would love to see continue brewing where he leaves off.

The goal with the expansion is to satisfy The Alchemist’s accounts, such as the Farmhouse Tap and Grill in Burlington and the Three Penny Taproom in Montpelier, without running out at the brewery.

“Before we had this increase, we would can on Monday and be sold out Tuesday, can on Thursday, and be sold out on Friday,” Kimmich said. “Four days a week we had no beer at our brewery, which is crazy.”

Mad River legend

Lawson’s Finest Liquids, if anything, is even harder to find than Heady Topper, unless you’re in the Mad River Valley, where it’s available at various local stores and restaurants. That’s because, unlike The Alchemist and Hill Farmstead, Sean Lawson does not have visiting hours or a retail counter at his brewery, which is in a shed in his backyard. He’s careful not to say where that back yard is exactly, so he doesn’t have aficionados showing up at his front door.

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Lawson’s is by far the smallest of the three breweries, producing about 500 barrels annually. Hill Farmstead weighs in at about 1,800 barrels annually. Nevertheless, Lawson says he’s in no hurry to grow.

“It’s hard because we have gotten so much attention and interest in our beer, there’s a lot of pressure to expand,” Lawson said. “Over the last few years, we’ve fielded dozens and dozens of calls from stores and distributors that want to carry our beer.”

Saying no is the hardest part of the business, Lawson says, because he wants to make people happy and say yes. But Lawson and his wife have two young children, who are their first priority.

“As long as the business is successful, paying its way, making a decent salary out of it, we want to try to focus on the quality of life we have,” he says. “That comes first.”

My way,
or the highway

All three brewers share a remarkable determination to do things their way, not only in the formulation of their beers, but also in their lifestyles. Shaun Hill, of Hill Farmstead Brewery, is building his business on land that has been in his family for generations. He has a deep and abiding sense of place and heritage, reflected most visibly in one of the naming conventions for his beers, based on his many, many ancestors.

The “Ancestral Series” includes Edward, Abner, Ephraim, James, Jim and Everett, among others. Edward beer is named after Shaun Hill’s grandfather, who once owned the land where the brewery now perches, with sweeping views in every direction. Edward is an American pale ale, “dutifully crafted from American malted barley, a plethora of American hops, our ale yeast and water from Edward’s well,” according to the Hill Farmstead website.

Hill, 33, spent two years in Denmark learning his craft, running a brew pub, helping start a brewery, before finding himself on a balcony in Copenhagen, drinking wine with a girlfriend who had just broken up with him, and contemplating his move back to northern Vermont.

“I was sitting there, poised to move home to try to start whatever the heck this was going to be,” Hill remembered. “That was the moment I realized it is about beer, but in particular, at least in my case, it’s because I have a sense of place, a desire to spend my life here.”

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Beer is the vehicle, Hill says, that allows him to live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, a “manifestation of my will,” according to the philosophy major.

“New Zealand is pretty damn beautiful, too,” the well-traveled Hill adds as an afterthought, sitting on the metal steps leading to his brew kettles.

A vision of taste

Both Hill and Lawson are experimenters, Hill even more so. Lawson, 42, produces a Maple Tripple Ale, substituting maple sap for water in the beer, which has won both bronze and silver awards in the specialty beer category for the World Beer Cup from the Brewers Association.

“It’s a labor of love, gathering up the sap from sugar makers,” Lawson says.

Sap beer is an old tradition in Vermont, according to Lawson, but no one has been making it recently, until he and Fiddlehead Brewing Co. in Shelburne started bringing it back. Lawson is still hoping for gold for Maple Tripple Ale.

Hill Farmstead has produced more than 80 varieties of beer since its founding in March 2010, including some with surprising ingredients.

“I’m often cited talking about our obsession with citrus, or other flavor profiles, so it’s really cool to taste something and continue to challenge your taste, your palate, your thoughts and your conceptions of what can be,” Hill said.

Hill says he wants to contribute to “paradigm shifts” in what beer can be.

“We’re constantly doing that, but we’re also doing it pretty successfully,” he said. “There haven’t really been failures of those beers.”

“Then maybe we put that beer in Grand Marnier barrels or sauvignon blanc barrels, or another barrel with something tart and citrusy in it,” he says. “Every beer we brew is typically constructed in such a way. We often have some vision of how it should taste and smell and appear.”

Just one beer

As much as they share in common, the three brewers don’t share everything. John Kimmich of The Alchemist makes one beer, Heady Topper, which he puts in cans only for very specific reasons.

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“Canning addresses quality issues, absolutely,” Kimmich says. “When a beer gets skunky, it’s ultraviolet light reacting with the hops, so you completely eliminate that. It’s unpasteurized and unfiltered, a living beer, so we’re nuts about it being refrigerated. We won’t sell to an account that doesn’t guarantee it will be refrigerated the entire time they have it.”

Kimmich first began making Heady Topper at his pub in Waterbury in November 2003, where he says it “struck a chord” with people right away.

“From day one it was a huge hit at the pub, only on draft,” Kimmich said.

Heady Topper currently sits atop a list of the world’s greatest beers compiled by Beeradvocate.com, with a perfect 100 rating.

“Everything, the quality, the uniqueness of it, the name, the brand, just everything, we recognized early on it was a home run,” Kimmich says. “Certain things resonate with the public. You’d be crazy not to take advantage of that.”

Take advantage, but within self-imposed limits. Shaun Hill seems to speak for all three brewers when he talks about another paradigm shift, this one in the way business is done.

“I think infinite, boundless growth is the American standard when it comes to business practice,” Hill said. “We absolutely violate those established norms, which is part of our own contribution to the paradigm shift.”

Hill Farmstead could make 100 times more beer, and it would all “vanish into the air,” Hill says, demand is so great. But like The Alchemist and Lawson’s Finest Liquids, Hill says demand is not his main concern.

“We certainly owe a lot to the consumers that are enthusiastic about our brands and our products, but I don’t think we need to compromise our quality of life and artistic integrity to try to please more people,” Hill said. “It’s a slippery slope.”